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'No Sweat' events

Author:

Stuart Jordan

Since October last year, London No Sweat, has been holding regular pickets of Tesco stores in the East End, exposing the exploitation that lies at the root of Tesco’s bumper profits and focussing particularly on workers’ struggles in Bangladesh. At our meeting in March Sam Maher updated us on the situation in Bangladesh.

Since October last year, London No Sweat, has been holding regular pickets of Tesco stores in the East End, exposing the exploitation that lies at the root of Tesco’s bumper profits and focussing particularly on workers’ struggles in Bangladesh

Mike Treen of New Zealand's Unite Union, which ran the Supersize My Pay campaign, and Axel Persson, a young fast food worker and CGT union activist from Paris, will do a speaking tour as part of No Sweat's 2008 week of action (11-18 February).

Mike Treen of New Zealand's Supersize My Pay campaign and Axel Persson, a young fast food worker and CGT union activist from Paris, will do a speaking tour as part of No Sweat's 2008 week of action (11-18 February). Details here.

Trade Unions:

Issues and Campaigns:

Author:

Jack Staunton

Over 100 anti-sweatshop and workers’ rights activists gathered in London on the weekend of 1-2 December for this year’s No Sweat conference. The theme chosen for this year’s conference by the campaign — which works within the anti-capitalist movement to argue for solidarity with workers’ movements at home and abroad — was “Beating Big Brand Exploitation”.

The workers'-rights, anti-sweatshop-conditions campaign No Sweat plans its activities for the coming months.

The highlight of No Sweat and Students Against Sweatshop’s Week of Action (18-23 Feburary) was welcoming Andreas Aullet, a lawyer working with political prisoners and their families in Oaxaca, Mexico, and taking him on a tour of the UK.

The Zanon tile factory in Neuquen is one of many “recovered” factories in Argentina – factories taken over and run by the workers. Faced with pay cuts and redundancies – and then no pay at all – the Zanon workers occupied and began to run the factory. They are coming to Britain to discuss their experience with activists here.

Despite several attempted evictions, the workers, supported by their local community and allies have held out and even managed to dramatically increase production, sales and jobs.

Issues and Campaigns:

Around 200 workers, students and activists gathered for the fifth annual No Sweat conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on Saturday 26 November. Speakers covered international and UK-based campaigns, from the Bolivian Solidarity Campaign to a TGWU cleaner activist and a session on the Arcadia Group which runs Top Shop. The sessions shared the theme of exposing global exploitation and building the global fight against it.

Publications:

In a left-wing culture where the normal method of “debate” is either to slanderously misrepresent your opponent or ignore her existence, the discussion on Venezuela at this year’s No Sweat conference was a welcome change. It provided the 80 or so anti-capitalist activists who came to the session with a chance to consider and discuss clearly distinct assessments of the ongoing struggles in Venezuela, while at the same time raising a number of issues of major importance to Marxist theory.